Sketches. Doodles. Experiments. Thoughts.

Dancer – Step by step

Because I’m apparently feeling musical today, I drew a dancer as well 😀 (No references, because I’m lazy and I didn’t run into any major trouble-spots that required it.)

And because I’m a nerd and I like my sketches and want to share them with ya’ll, I’m going to do just that! 😀

Here’s my process with a brief explanation, for those who care:

First I draw the lines of the body and flesh it out in a general way until it looks roughly like an accurate (if vague) human form doing the motion I want and conveying the feeling of rest or action that I’m going for. This woman is meant to look like she’s in mid-leg-sweep. The color of the sketch is pretty much irrelevant, I just choose to use the light blue because I often sketch in blue (that won’t scan) when I sketch in real life. And it’s easy to draw over.

Next, I flesh out my sketch a bit, adding more details and fine-tuning a few things.

Notice how I changed her foot position to look more natural, and how she now has eyes,nose, mouth, a hairline, and more definition in her hands,waist, and chest. I also try very hard not to loose the feeling of motion from the original sketch, because the finished drawing will just look uncomfortable and off balance if I do.

Then I go over both sketches (with the opacity dropped so I can see through them easily) and digitally ‘ink’ the image with finalized linework and refined detail.

Here it is without the sketch layer.

Then I add color, minor details, like the make-up and hair streaks, and any special effects, like shading, textures, etc, that I feel the image needs. In this case, I didn’t really do any shading or special effects beyond a few cosmetics.